Clinton Dining Hall staff temporarily removed

As the spring semester winds down, so does the staffing at Clinton Dining Hall. Recently, student workers are no longer allowed to work for the rest of the semester.

Debbie Christian is the human resources and training coordinator for Campus Dining through Chartwell. Christian hires people, does talent recruitment, onboarding, training and assists the management team throughout campus.

Christian said: “Campus Dining has not laid off any of our associates. We recently adjusted the schedules for Clinton Dining Hall to match the needs of the business.”

Workers at Clinton were kept on the schedule based on seniority.

“All associates working in Clinton were offered the opportunity to choose the position they wanted to work based on their seniority and there were no positions eliminated in the process,”Christian said .

Christian said the change in schedule has not affected the efficiency of the service or the customers of Clinton.

Jeff Vallee is the campus dietitian and oversees the Dining Advisory Committee.

“Chartwell has to manage the business based on people using the facility so as with more demand for a venue you need to have more staff however there is a criteria of minimum that must be met,” said Vallee.

PSUC’s dining hall services is through Chartwell catering. They create the schedule for the dining halls across campus. They oversee the business aspect of Clinton.

The wait time for the kiosks at Clinton has gone down since the beginning of the year. As of two weeks ago the order time hasn’t been affected by this change in staffing.

“The average wait time at the clinton kiosk is 5 to 6 minutes,” said Vallee, “That’s in line where we want it to be.”

Taylor Heath is a Human Development major and a PSUC sophomore. Although the wait time hasn’t affected her experience at Clinton, she has noticed a the cleanliness of the dining hall has changed.

“The tables, the utensils, bowls and plates have been dirtier in the last three weeks,” Heath said, “I have to look at tableware before picking it out.”

For the student workers, this has affected them as well.

Moussa Keita is a management information system major and PSUC sophomore. He started working at Clinton this year to pay bills and tuition.

“I was in the city for an interview then came back to find out that all students have been layoff,” Keita said.

Like Keita, students thought Clinton had fired them. However, Clinton has only taken them off of the work schedule for the rest of the semester because of hour cuts because less students are visiting the dining hall.

Keita came back to school to find no job forcing him to rely on his parents for help. He now has to rely on his parents to help him out with tuition and bills.

“They also have school tuition to worry about now they are going have to rely on their parent or look for another job,” Keita said.